


Believer

by MakingStarsShine



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Cisco is Stressed, Gen, Post Season 3 Finale, Season 3 Spoilers, as usual, he needs a hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-06 13:39:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11037315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MakingStarsShine/pseuds/MakingStarsShine
Summary: So I’ve had this request since well before Season 3 ended, but I felt it was a good fit for expressing some post S3 feels, so here we go! A request for: “Could I request an angsty/fluffy piece where Cisco and Reader get into a heated argument but then reader starts crying and Cisco immediately feels like shit and just holds her and snuggles her?“ I was a little heavy handed on the angst, and not so much on the fluff…oops? Enjoy!





	Believer

“Ow!” You cried out, flinching away from Julian, as the former field medic did his best to bandage your wounds.

 

 

“My apologies Y/N,” Julian replied with a frown, “but it might help, if you stopped fidgeting so much, and let me get this business over with?”

 

 

You frowned guiltily. “Sorry,” you apologized softly, “I just...I was hoping to get out of here before Cisco came back, y’know?”

 

 

Julian nodded, though the look on his face told you he disapproved. “Y/N, you’re going to have to face him eventually,” he reminded you, resuming his task of wrapping a bandage around your arm, “he is, after all, your superior technically speaking, Barry left him in charge when he...well when he left.”

 

 

“That he did Julian,” you agreed quietly, gritting your teeth against the memory of that night, and the pain it had brought with it.

 

 

Iris had been nearly inconsolable for a week, living in their shared apartment on her own hadn’t much helped her either. Cisco, bless his heart, had taken to leading the team like a nervous substitute teacher, unsure of himself in almost every decision but determined to man his post no matter what. Cynthia helped him, or at least tried to, but being an outsider herself in a way, she kept her guidance of Cisco to a minimum, not wanting to begin her new life on a new earth being seen as a puppetmaster to a man she reluctantly, but deeply cared for. Joe and Harry adapted to this new chain of command quite well considering, being the two most senior members of the team in regards to age, they became rather like the resident dads of Star Labs. They had their hands full with five children between them, but they performed as all father’s do, stoic and fiercely protective under pressure, happy to console, or in Harry’s case, gruffly affirm a difficult decision when such reassurance was needed.

 

 

Wally’s replacing of Barry as Central City’s Flash proceeded without much notice of the general public, there were one or two stories in the papers, asking where the savior in red had gone, but the questions were soon forgotten, and it seemed almost as though Wally had always been the only flash there was. He still called himself Kid Flash in private though, he still put his suit on a different mannequin, leaving Barry’s red one in the prominent place within the cortex, like some silent memorial that nobody spoke of, but looked to in times of difficulty.

 

 

You were probably the only one who still spoke of Barry as though he were still with the Team, refusing to shunt his existence to that of a mere memory. Everyone said they would find a way to bring him back, they were working on finding a way every day they said, searching and scanning and planning with every spare moment they had...and yet they treated him as though he were dead. You supposed that him being trapped in the speedforce as he was, it was easier that way, starting with low expectations after so much heaping disappointment, meant that proceeding with seemingly no progress didn’t sting quite so bad. But Barry was alive, and you would respect his sacrifice by remembering that fact, and behaving accordingly.

 

 

That was what had gotten you injured. Working with Tracy’s abandoned and re-configured speed bazooka, you had miscalculated a few things, leading to a rather spectacular explosion that thankfully hadn’t hurt anything but your pride, your arm, and your desk. Julian had found you rummaging in the med lab for bandages, and now here you sat, perched on the edge of a gurney while the medic worked to patch you up, ears trained towards the hall for the sound of the angry footfalls you knew would be coming eventually.

 

 

“There we are,” Julian finally declared, pressing lightly on a strip of gauze tape he applied to seal your bandaging, “you should be alright in a week or so, try not to get that wet though, and if you do, change the bandage or it will-”

 

 

“Thank you, Julian!” You called, ignoring the rest of his words in favor of making a run for it, hoping that if you scurried back to the workshop fast enough, you could fix your miscalculations before Cisco found out. But Cisco practically lived in that workshop, so it was really no surprise at all that you found him standing over the charred remains of your desk, waiting for you to return.

 

 

“Was is a burn or a gash?” he asked without turning around, his foot nudging a blackened piece of desk debris on the floor.

 

 

You glanced down at your arm, the bandage stark white against your skin, the pain underneath it down to a dull burning sensation. “Both,” you replied hesitantly, “but it’s alright now, Julian patched me up, see.” You brandished your arm towards his still turned back, nerves churning slowly in your stomach in the suspense, wondering if you would see anger, or disappointment in his eyes when he finally turned to face you.

 

 

“Both,” he repeated with a nod, tucking some hair away from his face, “well then I suppose it’s a good thing that it was only your arm, and not your chest, or stomach, or head,” he turned then, facing you with not anger, not disappointment, but oddly enough, sadness. “You really should be more careful Y/N,” he went on, approaching you slowly as he spoke, “I know that you wanted to keep this little project secret from me, but I’m sure Harry would have helped you, at the very least he’d have gone over your calculations for you,” he stopped just in front of you, reaching out a hand to inspect your arm.

 

 

You stared at him, watching the furrow of his brow as he examined your bandage, watching the way his eyes flickered from the bandage to the trails of soot across your clothes, the way his jaw clenched slightly before he met your gaze. This was not like him, this was too reserved, too closed off, this was...this was how Harry dealt with things. “I’m fine Cisco,” you assured him plainly, “Julian patched me up, and I know what I did wrong, I don’t need help to fix it,” you gently pulled your arm back from his grasp, “and it wasn’t a secret project, I was doing it out in the open, in our shared workshop, how is that supposed to be secr-”

 

 

“Y/N,” he cut you off, his jaw clenching a little more while his eyes hardened as he looked at you, “working on it in the open doesn’t mean it wasn’t a secret,” he turned to his own desk, lifting his tablet from its surface to show you what it displayed. “Tracy’s plans for the bazooka were locked in a folder on my private computer here, the readouts from the night we faced Savitar were too, and so were the plans that I drew up after getting back from Savitar’s lair where I reconfigured it into a skeleton key,” he scrolled through the folder that had contained the information he spoke of, each file you had systematically hacked and copied to your own personal device so as to keep your work secret. “I know you hacked my computer, and I know you’ve been trying to cannibalize the reconfigured bazooka into something that can get Barry back, so if you could please not lie to me, I would really appreciate it,” he set his tablet down again, the hard look in his eyes becoming anger.

 

 

You swallowed thickly, caught in your lie with no way out. It wasn’t that you didn’t want him to know what you were doing, or perhaps it was just that, you didn’t want him to know that you had taken to starting your own reconnaissance efforts because you believed his work was coming too slowly. You didn’t want him to see your lack of faith in his ability to bring Barry back because Cisco was your friend, and with everything else weighing so heavily on his shoulders, you didn’t want him to see this as just one more thing he was doing wrong.

 

 

“Is it pointless to apologize?” you asked quietly, looking down at your feet for a moment, “would you believe me if I said I’m sorry?”

 

 

Cisco scoffed, turning from you once again. “That depends Y/N, what are you sorry for?” he asked, “are you sorry for keeping this secret from me, are you sorry for hacking my computer, or are you sorry for telling me without words that you think I’m not working hard enough, because all three of those things were pretty low of you, but I suspect you’re only sorry about one of them.”

 

 

“Cisco, I-” you began, but he wouldn’t let you finish.

 

 

“I’m trying Y/N!” he finally burst out, “I know I’m not everyone’s first choice to lead, hell I’m not even my own first choice to lead, but I am doing the best I can, and it sucks!” he kicked the chunk of desk he’d nudged earlier, sending it smacking against a wall across the room. “Wally is running around out there with no backup, Cyndi is here trying her best to settle into this life that I’ve dragged her into, Iris is waiting with bated breath for any update on bringing Barry back, Harry and Joe keep on keeping on because it’s all they can do besides stepping in and taking this authority that’s been thrust upon me, Julian is tip-toeing around me, trying not to bring up Caitlin, and all of that, every last god awful detail of this mess that I’ve inherited, is just perfectly punctuated by the fact that you decided to work on your own to bring Barry back, because I’m not working fast enough!” Here was the anger you’d anticipated, the frustration, the break...but somehow you found, that you were the one in tears.

 

Cisco didn’t deserve any of this. Cisco didn’t deserve to be under so much pressure alone, without Barry, without Caitlin, and by your own stupid doing, without you. You had been avoiding the truth for a month now, telling yourself that this was helping him, your secrets were only secret because you didn’t want to burden Cisco with your plans, you wanted to take this thing off of his shoulders, and give it back to him light as a feather. But that wasn’t true, Cisco was right, you had lost faith in him somewhere along the way, and here you were with an injured arm, a charred up desk, no closer to bringing Barry back than Cisco was. “Cisco, I’m sorry,” you choked out, your face burning with tears now, “I know you’re trying, I know you’re overwhelmed, and overworked, and I know you’re working as hard as you can to bring Barry back, and I shouldn’t…god I shouldn’t have been so stupid,” you were sobbing so hard you could barely speak, your breaths shuddering out of you violently before you gasped them in again. You wanted to go on, to explain to him how sorry you were, how awful you felt, how horrible it was that you, his friend, had lied to him about something so important.

 

 

Arms enveloped you then, a firm chest pressed against your face, hands cradled your head to a warm and familiar body, with long dark hair tickling your forehead. “Y/N,” Cisco’s voice seemed to surround you like his hug. “I know you’re sorry, I know you didn’t mean for things to get like this, and I forgive you,” you let out a particularly forceful sob at that, but he went on, “Y/N I’m sorry I yelled, I’m sorry I snapped at you like that, but I think we both knew it was coming.” His arms tightened around you, and yours, in turn, snaked around his back. “You’re the only one I’ve got left Y/N,” he reminded you softly, “You’re the only one, who’s been here since the beginning, you’re the last friend I’ve got who knows just how far this team has come. Joe and Iris know, but not the whole story, not the way we do, they’re not...” he trailed off, a slight tremor in his voice just before he took in a deep breath and said, “you and me, we’ve been here since the beginning, so it’s our job to keep this team going, to keep this thing alive until we can get Barry back.”

 

 

You nodded against him, your breaths finally quieting into soft little hitches, your tears now drying against your skin. “I’m sorry,” you said once more, “you’re right, we’ve got to stand together or this isn’t going to work.” You pulled away from him then, looking up into his brown eyes, the same ones that once glittered with optimism, but now appeared aged beyond their years by responsibility. Those eyes hurt to look at. “Cisco,” you said his name in a near whisper, “I believe in you.”

 

 

Those beautiful brown eyes pinched at the sides and for a moment the smile that caused it almost reached them. “Thank you, Y/N,” Cisco replied quietly, a bitter laugh accompanying it before he added, “one of us ought to.”


End file.
